Should the Marshals Peace Corps be resurrected?

Marshals deployed by the Buffalo City Municipality for 

beach patrols, December 2010

When communities are under security threat autonomous means of self protection arise for self-protection. We see this happening, for example, in the waves of protest movements sweeping through North Africa and the Arab lands in the Mid East. When protests are peaceful and spontaneous they are vulnerable from two specific dangers. First, there is the danger that if the state feels threatened by the unrest they will employ provocateurs in order to entice clashes and conflict, and thus strike pre-emptively before the protest snowballs out of control. And the second danger are opportunistic, mostly criminal elements in the community who will see their chances to loot homes and businesses and even directly attack community members in robberies, rapes and murder.

It requires a minimum of organization within the protesting movements to encourage and endorse spontaneous action in the community street patrols, organize self-protection and set up some form of coordinating mechanism between these. In fact most revolutionary movements find themselves overtaken in situations where communities come under stress and fear for their own safety, take preemptive action, but laster get overwhelmed by a restoration of the old order. This happened in the 1971 Paris Commune uprising where a spontaneous Safety Committee arose, or in the 1848 revolutions in Europe where Safety Committees were set up and became nodal points for the growth of political power to unseat old regimes. More often than not they failed when restorations occurred either soon or a few years on and old regimes re-established themselves.

This cycle is mostly of longer duration and not visible from one year to the next. In the case of unrest in the townships which boiled over in the mid eighties causing the Apartheid Regime to send soldiers of the South African Defence Force into townships, the process of establishment of street and area committees was almost immediate, if not already existing. This heavy handed action merely led to intensification of self protection mechanisms in the populations. An important point here is that these more or less spontaneous street and area committees prefigured political movements such as the United Democratic Front, rather than the other way round. The township residents were concerned about bread and butter issues as well as social issues such as schooling, safety and security, and “service delivery” of water, electricity and sewerage systems. The UDF, and later the ANC imposed political agendas which today have backfired as precisely the same issues which caused the unrest in the seventies and reaching a peak in the mid nineteen eighties are back on the radar. All that happened is the old story of first a political dispensation which was branded “revolutionary”, and then restoration of vested interests leading to the same economic and social maladies boiling up in revolt all over again. Many have made the point that the intensity of unrest of recent years the “revolutionary” A N C government has to deal with, are the same as was the case with the “old regime” under Apartheid.

So at grassroots level not much has changed, besides what can be called “macro-cosmetic” measures to rid the country of overt race laws. After a respite of a number of years many townships were improved, but a steady influx from the rural to the urban areas resulted in squatter settlements and led to unrest of equal intensity of the mid eighties. While “service delivery”, or the absence of it, lies at the heart  growing unrest, one stands out central – the lack of protection services of the state. Violence that was masked as "political" in the pre-transition years has continued unabated and is the major predicament facing all of South African society, and especially in the poor communities. Crime has reached record levels when measured by international standards.

After the first democratic elections of 1994 there was a natural tendency for communities to revert to self protection mechanisms. In the townships vigilante groups bubbled from the streets while in the urban, still mainly white areas, neighborhood watches backed by experienced members of Commando Units of the old South African Defence Force were reactivated by residents. 


An overarching development was the stipulation in the National Peace Corps (1991) that inequalities in the South African society be ameliorated as a means to reduce violence and crime.  Marshal units were trained in community policing by observer missions and donor organizations before 1994, and played a very useful role in their traditional area of expertise, namely ensuring safety and security in their own communities. In this the marshal units of the Border Region excelled in preventing and quelling rioting following the fall of the Ciskei Bantustan government. They also excelled in turning back a mass march of 100,000 people when the advance was ambushed by soldiers of the Ciskei Defence Force. Ironically this ambush was provoked by Ronnie Kasrils, a leading member of the South African Communist Party and later Deputy Minister of Defence, ostensibly to steal a march on the ANC in demonstrating suzerainty in the national liberation movement. Almost one hundred marchers were killed and hundreds more seriously injured. Were it not for a well trained marshals brigade the damages inflicted by the Ciskei soldiers would have been much more severe.

With these background and overarching developments, the negotiations between the old Regime and the ANC put policing on the top of the list of priorities. Already the interim Constitution promulgated the establishment of Community Policing Forums to “monitor” the activities of each and every South African Police Station. In fact the philosophy of policing was changed moving the "force" towards a "service", thus the name change from “SAP” (South African Police) to “SAPS” (South African Police Service)  In many areas the old marshal structures filled the new space as Community Policing Forums, in some instances vigilante organizations became predominant. Community Policing as official government policy came off to a very shaky start.

This new approach to policing was hoped the have an immediate and significant impact on reducing crime. In the initial years, however, even though there was a falling off because of the ending of “black-on-black” violence, crime continued to spiral out of control. Soon flaws showed up in the policy and guidelines for setting up of Community Policing Forms as these became soccer balls between contending political factions, were infiltrated by sectional interests such as illegal liquor outlets and dens of prostitution.  Official frustration in quelling crime led to ever more desperate measures such as a “shoot to kill” policy in dealing with armed robbers, and a name change to "South African Police Force”, from “South African Police Service”. There was also an imposition of direct police control over Community Policing Forums by smothering them with a new level of police organization called Sector Policing.

The question now is, is a community volunteer system such as existed with the Marshals Peace Corps still relevant? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because the system of a properly community anchored structure to ensure community safety has been proven to be highly effective. But no because such a structure can only function when it gets direction directly from its own community, and is free from a top-down control by official authorities, including principally the police.